Blurred Vision, a Canadian band comprised of two brothers originally from Iran, just released a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall, part II” with a slight lyrical twist that changes the song’s antagonist from controlling teachers to the repressive Iranian regime. The new chorus supports the many young people who protested Ahmadinejad’s reelection by demanding, “Hey Ayatollah, leave those kids alone.”

The music video goes a little further with its message, showing a fictional young Iranian woman on the run from what appears to be the Basij militia as she tries to upload footage from a protest on her iPhone. The video is inter cut with actual footage taken by Iranian protesters, depicting protesters getting beaten by government forces.

While it’s hard to criticize artists who clearly mean well and care more about their political message than their commercial appeal, there are a couple popular misconceptions being forwarded by this song and video. As we’ve written about before, the role of social media has been greatly overstated—not only does it provide questionable information from a small segment of the Iranian population (wealthy, educated city dwellers who dislike Ahmadinejad’s social welfare programs) but it’s also not a reliable way to organize protests given the government’s penchant for internet crackdown.

Like everyone else trying to follow Iran from afar, the members of Blurred Vision may be (pardon the pun) blinded by their desire to see Iranians win greater freedom and civil liberties to the point where they are overlooking and distorting key facts. In a CNN interview they refer to the June elections as “rigged”—something even the mainstream magazine Foreign Policy says is untrue, citing a recent report from the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.

It’s important to point out these misconceptions because if furthered they could lead to several undesirable consequences, such as the justification for a US intervention or the installation of a new president without the fundamental changes to Iran’s political structure necessary for real change. As discussed in previous posts, the only way the Green Movement can hope to be successful is to support radical reform that incorporates not just the social reform everyone in Iranian society desires but economic reform that meets the needs of the poor.

Salon has an interesting historical piece about Johnny Cash and his battle with the music industry over a song called “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” It seems radio DJ’s didn’t want to play (nor did Columbia records want to promote) a song that detailed the historical abuse of Native Americans like Hayes, who was used and abused by his government as one of the Iwo-Jima flag raisers. Anyone who’s seen Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers knows what happened to Hayes: the unwanted fame helped fuel a depression that led to alcoholism and his eventual death.

Although the song was originally written by Peter La Farge, a folkie who frequented the same Greenwich Village scene as Bob Dylan and others, Cash was the first to popularize it with the release of his 1964 album Bitter Tears, an album entirely dedicated to the plight of Native Americans. While Salon writer Antonio D’Ambrosio brings further deserved attention to a man who devoted much of his life–oftentimes at the expense of his career–to defending the rights of the marginalized, the real fascinating part of this article is its brief history of Native American activism. Although concurrent with the Civil Rights Movement, it was something entirely different… Read the rest of this article »

London’s Telegraph did a captivating profile of folk icon and activist Joan Baez earlier this week. One of the more interesting points that Baez addressed was Bob Dylan’s abandonment of the protest song after his early years:

For her part, Baez was smitten by Dylan’s anthems of protest and social change. ‘It was as if he was giving voice to the ideas I wanted to express, but didn’t know how,’ she would later recall. She began to include his songs in her own repertoire, and invited him to tour with her. They became lovers, and his fame blossomed under her patronage. But once people began anointing him the ‘king of protest’ he quickly declared his abdication, abandoning what he called the ‘finger-pointing songs’ and refusing to lend his name to any cause. The growing distance between her political convictions and his apparent lack of them would eventually become the fault-line dividing them.

In her 1989 autobiography, And a Voice to Sing With, Baez remembers once asking Dylan what was the difference between them; simple, he replied, she thought she could change things, and he knew that no one could.

So who, I ask her, does she think was right?

‘I would say we both were. Certainly for him, he’s right. But he’s not in the business of changing things. He never was. And that’s where my mistake was with him. I kept pushing him, wanting him to want to do that. Exhausting for him, and futile for me. Ridiculous. Until I finally put it together in my head that he had given us this artillery in his songs, and he didn’t really need to do anything aside from that. I mean, he may resent it, but he changed the world with his music.’

Resent it?

‘Well, just because he doesn’t want to think about that sort of thing. He doesn’t want the responsibility. On the other hand, I have enough intelligence to know I don’t understand him, and that’s why it’s so futile to keep talking about him.’

Although, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Dylan is such a pessimist, given his rather withdrawn personality, it is nevertheless sad that he doesn’t see the power of his early work and lost that initial spark, which drove him to the spotlight.

Thankfully, we have Joan, who, perhaps more than anyone other than Pete Seeger, has used music to express a hope for peace and justice. And it’s no wonder why she still feels as though she can change the world:

Someone else asks her if she still considers herself a protest singer. ‘The foundation of my beliefs is the same as it was when I was 10,’ she says. ‘Non-violence.’ If there is something she can do, then she will do it, she tells me later.

Although she was born in Israel to Jewish parents and raised in Ann Arbor Michigan, Detroit-based MC Invincible has a pretty deep understanding of the issues facing Palestinians, as evidenced by the above music video for her song “People Not Places.” In fact, it would be near impossible for any Westerner to fully comprehend the song’s many historical and cultural references without reading her very insightful lyrics page.

Invincible (whose name is Ilana Weaver) says it took years to write the song, but that it was originally inspired by a conversation she had with her mom, who responded to a question about missing Israel, by saying, “I miss people. I don’t miss places.” But given that so many indigenous people were displaced to create the nation state of Israel, Invincible says she came to see “what a priviledge it was to not miss this place and to not prioritize that connection between people and places.”

The song and video then became a product of her recently launched project Emergence Travel Agency, which aims to create “media that resists displacement, gentrification, colonization, occupation, obstruction of movement, denial of the right to leave, and denial of the right to return.”

The “People Not Places” video follows through on that objective. In it, Invincible plays two characters, explained by her website as: “a Birthright Israel tour recruiter, styled as a used car salesman; and herself, subverting the recruiter’s mission by exposing the buried Palestinian significance of each location in the tour.” The video is also interspersed with interviews of Palestinians and people from other displaced refugee communities.

The effect is extremely moving and provocative. But not just because the message is so strong and on point. Invincible is also an undeniably talented MC. Were it not for that fact, her message could easily fall flat.

Her skills have not gone unrecognized. Last year, the Detroit Metro Times ran a cover story on Invincible, calling her “one of the best emcees in the country.” Talib Kweli has also given her a shout out as “One of the most talented emcees I’ve ever heard black or white, male or female…”

Hopefully we’ll be hearing plenty more from her.

Outside a Joan Baez concert a couple nights ago in Idaho Falls, four Vietnam veterans  protested the show with signs reading: “JOAN BAEZ – SOLDIERS DON’T KILL BABIES, LIBERALS DO” and “JOAN BAEZ GAVE COMFORT & AID TO OUR ENEMY IN VIETNAM & ENCOURAGED THEM TO KILL AMERICANS!”

Rather than ignore the protest, which would have been the easiest thing to do, or get into a nasty argument with the men about their signs, Baez choose to engage them in an exemplary nonviolent fashion. According to Daily Kos:

Joan was informed that the men were protesting her concert about an hour before it was due to begin and she immediately walked out onto the street to talk to them.  When she approached, one of the first things they said was “We appreciate the work you did on civil rights and women’s rights.”  They wanted to make that point clear.

She listened closely as they discussed their views.  Primarily, they wanted to express the way they felt betrayed by anti-war protesters when they returned from combat.  Joan assured them that she stood by them then and now.  They had mixed reactions as she explained her actual positions and her support for all veterans, across the board.

The protesters at first were hardened in their position, and it sounds like at different points the conversations did get quite tense. However, Baez’s calm, nonviolent approach to the conflict had an effect:

…Joan’s continuing acceptance of their stories and her willingness to hear them out began to melt their anger.  In a twist that seems hard to fathom, they then asked her to SIGN THEIR POSTERS!  She replied that she would sign the back but not the front of “those horrible things.”  Incredibly, the man with the baby-killing sign replied that he would take her name off the poster if she would sign it.

She did end up signing them, and also getting copies of her book for each of them, and offering tickets to the show, which they did not accept.  She signed the back of the poster about her encouraging the killing of American soldiers – “All the very best to you, Joan Baez.”

[...]

During the concert afterwards Joan dedicated a song to the protesters and said “You know, they just wanted to be heard.  Everyone wants to be heard. I feel like I made four new friends tonight.”

While I don’t know anywhere near as much about Baez as I would like, she seems to really embody nonviolence and understand what it’s all about. Her approach to this potentially ugly situation is something that we should all take note of, especially as the right wing steps up its protest against health care reform and government action on climate change.  It can be extremely difficult and won’t always work, but love, respect and a sincere openness to engage the opponent in conversation is the only way we will ever be able to win over those we disagree with.

To read a wonderful and humorous story that Baez wrote about nonviolence, click here.

Perhaps this should have been posted a while ago, before the Michael Jackson news fatigue settled in, but like a lot of people I’m only now—by way of nostalgic revision—starting to truly appreciate his artistry. Beyond the undeniable excitement of his music and performances, however, I’ve come to see there’s a great deal more to his persona than the paparazzi and our consumptive Western media culture are willing to show us.

For instance, by way of the Times of India, I learned that Michael drew great inspiration from Gandhi* and took to heart his famous saying, “Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” In a speech he gave at Oxford Union in 2001, Michael spoke about his own experience of learning to forgive his father for the beatings and detachment he suffered as a child, taking that all important nonviolent step of loving and understanding your enemy.

I have started reflecting on the fact that my father grew up in the South, in a very poor family. He came of age during the Depression and his own father, who struggled to feed his children, showed little affection towards his family and raised my father and his siblings with an iron fist. Who could have imagined what it was like to grow up a poor black man in the South, robbed of dignity, bereft of hope, struggling to become a man in a world that saw my father as subordinate … My father moved to Indiana and had a large family of his own, working long hours in the steel mills, work that kills the lungs and humbles the spirit, all to support his family. Is it any wonder that he found it difficult to expose his feelings? Is it any mystery that he hardened his heart, that he raised the emotional ramparts? And most of all, is it any wonder why he pushed his sons so hard to succeed as performers, so that they could be saved from what he knew to be a life of indignity and poverty?

He closed his speech with the Gandhi quote and told those who felt let down or cheated by their parents to resist the urge to push away and instead give them “the gift of unconditional love, so that they too may learn how to love from us.”

Somehow, through all his sufferings—at the hands of an abusive father and a parasitic media—he became and remained a loving and forgiving person. And yet, we never grant him credit for this hard work of the soul. All we can do is focus on his eccentricities, and maybe, if we’re feeling empathetic, as we have these past few weeks, we’ll accept them as a manifestation of his lost childhood and an ever-demanding media spotlight. At our worst, when we have no empathy, we dismiss that which we don’t like or understand about him as perversion and deviance.

As such, a man who was all too human—vulnerable to abuse and objectification, sympathetic to warmth and kindness—can never be seen as anything more than a freak of circumstance, a non-human. This is the real tragedy of Jackson’s legacy. May he forgive us.

*Gandhi and King both appear in his “Man in the Mirror” music video, above.

Earlier this month, Palestinians organized and staged Hip-Hop Kom, a rap competition broadcast in the West Bank and Gaza showcasing the talent of local rappers. As Jordan Flaherty, writing for The Electronic Intifada, notes, “Through the use of video conferencing and projection, each city could see and hear the performances happening in the other. Five groups from Gaza participated, coming in first, third, and fourth place.” Although Gazans took the prize, the real victory goes to all the Palestinians who orchestrated and participated in the event which embodied the principles of pragmatic nonviolence. It was a subversive action, daring to unite and voice the angst of oppression over melodious beats and rhythms. It was a bold demonstration of the power of Palestinian youth and their ability to peacefully and creatively mobilize themselves in the face of violence.

I see Palestinians turning toward an art form that was birthed by oppressed black people in the US and I can’t help but notice the parallels between the groups. Hip-hop gives expression to the plight of marginalization and it vocally validates the experience of the oppressed. In the US, we are witnessing the infiltration of hip hop by forces of materialism and greed. In Palestine, the essence of hip-hop still remains close to the root of active struggle and resistance against on oppressive order. Palestinian hip-hop reminds us that the poverty of the South Bronx shares a common cause with the poverty of Jenin. It calls us back to the realization that we are all a people in struggle against the war machine. While we let hip-hop die on its native soil, a drumbeat from Palestine calls us toward a resurrection fueled by the knowledge that our country deprives and exploits its poor at home in order to make war on others abroad.

Palestinians are painfully aware that life in Palestine depends on perception and awareness in the US. Getting back to the roots of hip-hop will situate us at the interface of the international and the domestic and will put us in solidarity with local and global networks of people struggling for change and freedom from tyranny. Hip hoppers in the US must therefore take hip-hop as seriously as the Palestinians do and utilize it as a tool to organize and elevate the consciousness of the nation. We must bring the human face of Palestine to our fellow Americans but in order to do so we have to get closer to them ourselves. Can we show them that we care? Or are we too committed to rapping about money and illusory prosperity? Are we exporting our solidarity or a vain, materialistic outlook on life? Are we representatives of the status quo of imperialism and colonialism or do we chant the fires of resistance? Only we can decide.